On The Nightstand

On the nightstand this week (next to the vaporizer) is Born To Buy by Juliet B. Schor, about how marketing targets kids. It's all right, although she gets pretty damn snarky at times about how the Bush administration isn't doing anything to stop it. In Chapter 5 she seems to think Bush's "underfunding" of schools has somehow caused the greedy glee with which school administrations take corporate money. Aside from the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of school funding is state and not federal, I think the larger problems are that schools are so addicted to money, and districts are so good at siphoning it off from actual instruction. (Where's anti-materialism when you really need it?) And she seems to think "conservatives" are responsible for advertising being what it is. Yeah right, all those New York ad execs are conservatives. I bet New York City is just teeming with conservatism. But what do I know, I'm not some highfalutin' researcher.

I swear I'll stop reading the book if she snarks at Bush or conservatives one more time, though. I just have zero tolerance for that kind of nonsense, especially when I've already got the point of the book.